Starting a Wellness Program organization Plan, part 2

Wellness Program organization plan review (from Key #19)
• A Wellness Program organization plan is a roadmap for success.
• Your Wellness Program organization plan should convincingly demonstrate that your Wellness Program will help the organization to achieve its goals.

More smart Wellness Program organization planning strategies

Planning the Wellness Program
• Find out how your organization plans so that your planning process will be in sync with what already happens in the company.
• Involve other people. A planning team brings their combined experience and perspective to the process. Including potential partners as you plan will make it easier to get their buy-in later.

Thinking of the big picture
• Consider the barriers and challenges that might be encountered during Wellness Program implementation. Develop strategies ahead of time to overcome these potential problems.
• Do a SWOT analysis and examine Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.

This analysis will help you identify potential problem areas or resource shortfalls as well as opportunities for growth or increased partnerships with other company personnel.

The WORST organization planning strategy: sitting in your office; working by yourself.

The best Wellness Program organization planning strategies
• Get out of your office; get out of the organization. The more people you involve in the Wellness Program planning process, the better. Always look for ways to expand your network.
• Keep your budget people informed. Get to know their philosophy of financial management.
• Be able to articulate the impact if your budget is not fully funded.
o Avoid basing your impact-if-not-funded argument solely on: “We have to.”
o Instead, describe the impact-if-not-funded with phrases like: injuries to workers, raised compensation costs, raised medical care costs for patients, lost work time, loss of licenses/accreditations, loss of workload to the Tricare network.
• Have purchase requests ready to be submitted. There is often a short window of time to process these requests. Having the information gathered ahead of time will make it easy to submit the information right away.

A well thought-out Wellness Program organization plan is essential in these times of shrinking budgets and resources. A good organization plan will help you gain leadership support and help you get and keep resources needed to implement the Corporate Health Promotion Program.